


breathe the bitter taste

by perfectlyrose



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Angst, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Friendship, Gen, M/M, Nightmares, Season 8 compliant, Shiro and Curtis are still married and there is no cheating, and shiro is on his way to some keith-related realizations but he's not there yet, but said marriage is definitely falling apart, hopefully that explains the relationship tags, is a tag that should have been earlier, oh and
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-26
Updated: 2019-02-26
Packaged: 2019-11-05 22:13:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,271
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17927351
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/perfectlyrose/pseuds/perfectlyrose
Summary: Curtis sleeps like the dead. Once he’s asleep, nothing short of his deafeningly loud series of alarms or a galaxy-wide emergency can rouse him. Shiro thinks that he used to find it endearing, in the way most quirks are when tinted rose at the beginning of a relationship.Now he’s mostly just glad that his husband doesn’t know how often Shiro wakes up with a scream stuck in his throat.Shiro wakes up reeling from one of his too-frequent nightmares and reaches out to someone he knows will understand and help him through it.





	breathe the bitter taste

**Author's Note:**

> shoutout to Jess for telling me to write some Shiro angst and then reassuring me that this wasn't terrible. gotta work on getting my angst mojo back!
> 
> Also, this is not intended to be a Curtis hate fic. He doesn't get a great rap in this but it's solely because it's Shiro POV in a relationship that is falling apart and it's only human to harbor a bit of resentment/bitterness at times as things deteriorate.
> 
> tagging this was my own personal nightmare so hopefully that turned out alright.
> 
> title from _Until The Levee_ by Joy Williams

Curtis sleeps like the dead. Once he’s asleep, nothing short of his deafeningly loud series of alarms or a galaxy-wide emergency can rouse him. Shiro thinks that he used to find it endearing, in the way most quirks are when tinted rose at the beginning of a relationship.

Now he’s mostly just glad that his husband doesn’t know how often Shiro wakes up with a scream stuck in his throat. Curtis thinks that retiring means Shiro has left the war behind, doesn’t know that the war stalks Shiro in his sleep and in the quiet moments that he has too many of now.

Shiro pulls in a shuddering breath and then another, forcing his lungs to unfreeze. Expand. Contract. Repeat until it doesn’t require conscious thought. 

Slowly, he swings his legs over the side of the bed. It’s another minute before he gets up and walks out of their room on unsteady knees.

The kitchen is his first stop. He knows better by now than to try and hold anything that might break so he opts for a water bottle over a glass. His hands shake and it takes three tries to twist the top off. Shiro forces himself to take slow sips until the bottle is half empty, focusing on the cold trickle of liquid down his throat, on how it settles uncertainly in his stomach.

The darkness presses against him, sliding slow and sinuous over his skin and making him shudder. He closes his eyes and takes measured breaths, fighting back the residual panic still clawing at his bones. Expand. Contract. In. Out.  _ Breathe _ .  _ Relax _ .

As soon as his heartrate slows to something close to acceptable, he pads towards his study. It’s his sanctuary in the house, a place that is wholly his, a place he can retreat too when he starts feeling fragile and fragmented. He closes the door without a sound despite knowing that the click of the latch won’t wake Curtis.

Shiro nabs his longrange comm device off his desk and curls up in the armchair in the corner, knees pulled to his chest.

He shouldn’t call. He knows he shouldn’t. He should go back to his room and try to wake up his husband and seek comfort from him.

Shiro hates knowing he’d find that comfort completely empty. Curtis hadn’t been there for most of the things his nightmares were born from, couldn’t even fathom such things existing in the whole of the universe. Nightmares were almost childish in his view, something to be gotten over and past with a handful of soothing words, a few pats on the back, and maybe some sleeping pills.

Shiro’s thumb hovers over the familiar contact on his comm, still shaking in the aftermath of his terror. He hesitates. He considers.

No, Curtis couldn’t understand this trauma and how it lingers in the corners of Shiro’s existence always. He doesn’t know the bone-deep fear Shiro wakes to almost every night. 

It’s not his fault. Shiro has hidden it - the trauma, the nightmares, the non-physical scars - from him since the moment they met, hoping that having someone see him without all his flaws and fault lines and jagged edges would put him on the path to feeling whole again.

He presses the call symbol just as the screen is about to flicker back to darkness. The buzzing ringtone is jarring in the quiet and Shiro waits, chin propped on his knee and already full of guilt for making the call. It eats at his stomach, mixing with the nightmare anxiety in a gut-churning cocktail.

“Shiro? Is everything okay?” Keith answers. Just like he always does. His voice is rough and Shiro thinks he might have woken him. 

The video lags behind the audio, connecting a few seconds late and confirming Shiro’s suspicion.  Keith’s sitting up in bed still blinking sleep from his eyes, braid half undone and messy around his face, his overlarge tshirt canted to one side.

“I’m sorry,” Shiro rasps out. His own voice is rough from whatever sounds escaped when he was trapped in the grasp of twisted memories, from the ones he trapped in his throat upon waking. “I shouldn’t have called.”

“Yes, you should have,” Keith says, sure and certain and everything Shiro needs. “Nightmare again?”

Shiro nods. He doesn’t look at the corner of the screen to see how obvious it is. He feels terrible and he doesn’t need a camera to confirm it for him.

“I shouldn’t…” he trails off, swallowing hard. “I shouldn’t have to…”

“Shiro, it’s okay to need help.” He waits until Shiro looks back at him. “You’re the one who taught me that. You know I’m always here for you.”

Guilt crawls up his spine now. “I know,” he whispers. “I’m sorry.”

He’s apologizing for so much more than this call and he knows Keith doesn’t catch the nuance, not when it’s the middle of the night for both of them and Keith’s focus is on talking him through the aftereffects of his nightmare.

“You don’t need to apologize to me,” he says softly. “Do you want to talk about it or do you want a distraction?”

Keith doesn’t need to know that Shiro watched him die earlier tonight, doesn’t need to know about a plasma sword through his heart and a head that cleared the moment the blade slid home. Shiro doesn’t want to think about it and he thinks Keith has his own nightmares to contend with, even if he doesn’t call Shiro for comfort.

“Distraction,” Shiro answers without hesitation.

Keith tells him about the latest antics Ezor has gotten up to and the specs of the new ship he’s getting in a couple of movements. He yawns halfway through describing how Hunk’s trying to improve the nutrition and taste of the food the Blades are delivering to those in need.

“You should get back to sleep,” Shiro tells him. “I’ve kept you up long enough and I’m sure you have work tomorrow.” They’ve been talking for an hour. Shiro’s eyelids are starting to feel heavy too. His breath is back to feeling even and easy.

“I do, but I’ve gone with less sleep so don’t start in on the guilt, Shiro. I’m glad you called.”

“Thank you,” Shiro tells him, letting the sincerity bleed into his voice. It drowns out the guilt he couldn’t prevent if he tried.

“And Shiro?” Keith’s eyes are shining with obvious care and concern, even through the fuzzy connection. “I’m here whenever you need me, but talking to someone about how bad the nightmares are might help. Like a professional someone.”

Shiro swallows hard. “I’ll think about it,” he promises.

“That’s all I ask.” He offers up half a smile, painful only in all the ways Shiro’s missed seeing it. “Night, Shiro.”

“Goodnight, Keith.”

The call disconnects and Shiro forces himself to get up and set the communicator back in the charging cradle instead of lingering. He drains the rest of the water bottle he’d left on the desk and then heads back to the bedroom.

He feels steadier now, like his foundations have been shored up once again. Keith’s always had that effect, even when he’s a galaxy or more away, even when Shiro hasn’t seen him in person in almost a year.

Shiro slips back under the covers and tries to swallow down the mounting frustration that Curtis hadn’t so much as moved through his whole crisis, tries not to choke on the guilt that the name on his lips when he woke from his nightmare earlier was not that of the man next to him. 

It never is.

**Author's Note:**

> find me on [twitter](https://twitter.com/LionessNapping) and [tumblr](http://perfectlyrose.tumblr.com) generally ignoring the entire existence of s8 except when it serves my need for angst


End file.
